Charter school lemons

If we're interested in innovation in education, then we need an environment that allows for:

• Autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic rules
• Choice for parents, so they can choose to leave schools that fail them and go to schools that they think will do better
• A willingness to take risks
• A willingness to close or replace innovations and charters that fail

This Time magazine piece makes the point well.  "TIME got an exclusive first look at the most comprehensive evaluation of charter school networks ever, and although the study, which will be released on Nov. 4, underscores the challenge of creating quality schools, it also makes clear that it is indeed possible to build a lot of schools that are game-changers for a lot of students."

Here's what I think is the key passage:

How much risk and failure are we willing to tolerate to create much better schools for students who don’t have them today? Or, put another way, if I told you there was a way to create 10 outstanding networks of schools for students who lack decent educational options now but that the cost of doing this would be the creation of four lousy networks of schools, would you take the deal?  

Critics of charter schools say this choice is a false one and that we should instead focus on improving existing schools. But their argument ignores the immediacy of educational failure. We’re talking about communities where public schools are not failing just a little but where the catastrophe of broken lives unfolds every school year, places where less than half of high schoolers graduate and where fewer than one in ten students finish college by their mid-20s. And let’s not forget, despite all the noise about turning around persistently failing schools, that successful turnarounds are like snow leopards — more mythical than actually observed. 

Charter proponents also disagree with the lose-some-to-win-some premise. Their main argument against it is that bad charters can be shut down. It’s true that this does happen — government officials have refused to renew some charters — but it’s proving to be more difficult in practice than in theory. There is an old saw in education that closing a school is like moving a cemetery: you get very little help from the inside. Charter parents and teachers often resist school closures just like their counterparts in the traditional system, and today there are not enough effective — read strong — charter school authorizers around the country.

And I agree with that completely.  If we want to achieve great success, the only way to figure out what works better is to try new approaches, and some of those approaches will not succeed--may even be worse than already exists.  But the difference is the choice that parents have.  Leaving just the monopoly system without real variety and choice for parents shackles students to a school and a system that has been mediocre or worse for decades.  When charters fail, there are no shackles, and parents can freely leave to greener pastures.

However, Utah also faces the same conundrum from the study noted above, namely that parents and school officials often resist the closure of a charter just like the same groups do at traditional schools.  That makes it politically difficult to pull the closing trigger, and it's never actually happened in Utah.

I'm a free-market guy who generally believes that if parents are satisfied enough to stay a a school, even if the bureaucracy or the government doesn't like it, we should give deference to what parents are choosing as the best option for their kid, even if the system thinks they shouldn't.  Finding the balance between parental choice and public accountability is a tricky balance.

So, I suggest that Utah needs the following:

• Expansion of charter schools, particularly successful charter schools, so that parents' choices are not limited by mile-long waiting lists;
• School districts that embrace innovation, relying less on boundaries, and that really empower schools to innovate and achieve--along with the inherent risks that come with allowing parents to choose to leave;
• A realistic mechanism to close or replace failing schools, both traditional and charter, including making it easier to convert a traditional school to a charter (the state Charter Board has made progress in this area, but I believe they also need an enrollment trigger);
• Real freedom in schools to allow for the variety that gives families real choices, including freedom in whom they hire, what they teach (let a school decide that more time teaching reading is more important than teaching how to use laundry detergent), and how they spend money;
• No fear to try something and fail.